As the level of technology increases, the options for communications have become more varied. For example, in the last 30 years in the telecommunications industry, personal communications have evolved from a home having a single rotary dial telephone, to a home having multiple telephone, cable and/or fiber optic lines that accommodate both voice and data. Additionally, cellular phones and Wi-Fi have added a mobile element to communications. Similarly, in the entertainment industry, 30 years ago there was only one format for television and this format was transmitted over the air and received via antennas located at homes. This has evolved into both different standards of picture quality such as, standard definition TV (SDTV), enhanced definition TV (EDTV) and high definition TV (HDTV), and more systems for delivery of these different television display formats such as cable and satellite. Additionally, services have grown to become overlapping between these two industries. As these systems continue to evolve in both industries, the service offerings will continue to merge and new services can be expected to be available for a consumer. Also these services will be based on the technical capability to process and output more information, for example as seen in the improvements in the picture quality of programs viewed on televisions, and therefore it is expected that service delivery requirements will continue to rely on more bandwidth being available throughout the network including the “last mile” to the end user.
Another related technology that impacts both the communications and entertainment industries is the Internet. One protocol that has been used with the Internet since the early 1990s is the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP). This protocol is a transaction-based protocol which was initially designed primarily for accessing Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) pages and was not necessarily designed to handle the physical structures of the Internet and associated communication streams which have evolved to handle an increased flow of data. For example, servers have more memory than ever before, communications links exist that have a higher bandwidth than in the past, processors are faster and more capable and protocols exist to take advantage of these elements. As consumers' usage of the Internet expands, service companies have turned to the Internet (and other Internet Protocol (IP) networks) as a mechanism for providing traditional services. Evolutions to the HTTP, e.g., HTTP 1.1, have improved its capabilities in this regard and various hardware vendors are familiar with integrating HTTP with their equipment. Newer services now exist which take advantage of previous improvements including, for example, IP television (IPTV, referring to systems or services that deliver television programs over a network using IP data packets), video on demand (VOD), voice over IP (VoIP), and other web related services received singly or bundled together.
To accommodate the new and different ways in which IP networks are being used to provide various services, new network architectures are being developed and standardized. IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is an architectural framework utilized for delivering IP multimedia services to an end user. The IMS architecture has evolved into a service-independent topology which uses IP protocols, e.g., Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) signaling which operates in a peer to peer fashion, to provide a convergence mechanism for disparate systems. In part this is accomplished via the provision of a horizontal control layer which isolates the access network from the service layer. Among other things, IMS architectures may provide a useful platform for the rollout of IPTV systems and services.
Accordingly, exemplary embodiments described below address the need for network entities and methods which facilitate communications between devices which utilize different signaling protocols.